My IDE of preference is now JetBrains Rider

[Neal]

It's official, I prefer JetBrains Rider for my .NET development now. I'm tired of the sluggish pig that is Visual Studio. While I noticed an improvement in 17.7 the joy using Rider brings me is something I don't experience with Visual Studio. I dabbled in VS Code prior to Rider and see why so many are using VS Code as well, it's just a better "less friction" experience for whatever reason. I will still likely use a various array of IDE's such as VS for Mac for my iOS work and probably stay with Visual Studio for Android work but will see how Android works for me with Rider as Rider supports it. I just have mature mobile apps that I don't really want to be changing IDE's (compilers, etc.) at this point but will dabble.

I liked Rider so much I upgraded my subscription to their everything plan, I had the Resharper tools for VS which included Rider I believe. Maybe I entered the Rider experience at the right time but the latest release of 2023.2 is amazing. I'm not affiliated with or sponsored by anyone for that matter but I'm just sharing how much I am enjoying Rider with my latest ASP.NET Core / Razor work.

 

[cjard]

How did you find the transition across? Is it so vastly different that you're spending time hunting "where the heck is the locals window" or have they made good effort to make switching easy, with few new concepts to learn?

Does it feature the same designers? Or, better, does it feature any good preview for razor/Blazor/wpf markups or maybe even a visual designer for them?

 

[Neal]

It's a great UI and they just changed to a "new UI" - it is very easy to find stuff, and it's a joy. I checked out Android, it seems fine with designers, I'm using asp.net razor, love it, have not tried other areas of .NET development such as WPF/XAML etc. I'll use whatever IDE is best for my work and VS is not gone but I'll use Rider for anything that I can as it is such a pleasure to work in. Plugins are great too, themes, etc.

 

[Neal]

One nice thing is Rider is cross-platform. I can use it on Windows all day, then when downstairs at my Mac I can bring it up in Rider on the mac for an identical UI and continue working.